My father’s addiction made him a stranger. Was it too late to get to know him now?
By Sebastian Johnson
‘Wow. This is really beautiful, son, thanks so much for this.”
I’m sitting in a restaurant watching my father thumb through a small silver photo album from my parents’ wedding. It’s the first time he’s seen the album in 25 years. It’s only the third or fourth time I’ve seen him in a decade.
I got the album after my mother died suddenly in her sleep in 2016. My father was in a Maryland prison then. Now he’d been paroled, and here I was learning about a wedding she’d rarely talked about.
Like millions of Americans, I am a child of addiction. Research indicates that an annual average of 8.7 million children ages 17 or younger live with a parent addicted to drugs or alcohol. Drug deaths rose by 21 percent in 2016, the biggest annual increase ever recorded. Today’s headlines warn of the arrival of a new drug crisis, driven by a flood of opiates and alcohol. For the second year in a row, American life expectancies declined in 2016 because of the surge in the death rate from drug overdoses.
When my parents married in the late 1980s, Washington, D.C., was on the verge of a coming catastrophe: crack cocaine. Cheap, highly addictive crack flooded the city, fueling…
